“The Fifth Element” may only have tallied $63 million at the U.S. box office, but stronger performances in other countries pushed it to $263 million worldwide. Combined with its popularity on home video in the following years where it became a hit with more fans, the movie became a bona fide classic and fans have been asking for decades if we could ever see a sequel. The reason we haven’t seen one yet, though, is the same reason we probably never will: Creator and director Luc Besson has no interest.
“For me there’s no point to go back to the same place,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “No matter how much you love a film, the fun is to try something else. Otherwise, I’m going to do ‘Fifth Element,’ ‘Sixth Element,’ ‘Seventh,'” he said with clear frustration when it comes to Hollywood’s obsession with sequels. “That’s not interesting,” he concluded. Of course, in 2017, he talked about the possibility of doing a sequel to “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets,” but was quick to explain why “The Fifth Element” was different.
“In ‘The Fifth Element,’ there’s nothing in the DNA to make a sequel,” he told ComicBook.com. “There is none. [Dallas and Leeloo] just live together, and they’re happy, and she’s the fifth element, and that’s it, and they resolve the problem.” For Besson, it’s all about what’s honest about the story. “[A sequel] will be fake. It will be just for money, and I’m not interested.”
